neutron

"The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman Here you are, a human being, a grand Universe of atoms that have organized themselves into simple monomers, assembled together into giant macromolecules, which in turn comprise the organelles that make up your cells. And here you are, a collection of around 75 trillion specialized cells, organized in such a way as to make up you. Image credit: J. Roche at Ohio University. But at your core, you are still just…

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way -- things I had no words for." -Georgia O'Keeffe When it comes to the Universe, it isn't just the stuff that's in it that's important. Image credit: 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC). It's also how all that stuff interacts with itself and everything else. To the best of our knowledge, there are four fundamental forces in the Universe, and they're all essential to our existence. Image credit: Stichting Maharishi University of Management, the Netherlands. Some of them are familiar, like gravitation. On the…

There is a very techincal paper this morning by Martin Bojowald that asks the question, How Quantum Is The Big Bang? Let me break it down for you. If you took a look at empty space and zoomed in on it, looking at spaces so small that they made a proton look like a basketball, you'd find that space wasn't so empty after all, but was filled with stuff like this: What are these? They're little pairs of matter particles and anti-matter particles. They spontaneously get created, live for a brief fraction of a second, and then run into each other and disappear. That's what happens on very small…

Ahh, stars. Giant furnaces of nuclear fusion. Doing the stuff our Sun does, burning hydrogen fuel into helium (among other things) and emitting lots of visible light and energy in the process. But when we take a look at brown dwarfs, they aren't like normal (i.e., main sequence) stars like our Sun. Instead of burning hydrogen into helium for their fuel, brown dwarfs don't generate enough pressure to make that happen; they can only burn hydrogen into deuterium. Let's go over what the differences here are. A hydrogen nucleus is just a proton, with a mass of 938.272 MeV/c2. (I use these units…